I say a very loud no to U.S. military intervention in Syria and have just written my two Vermont senators and single representative, urging them to do the same.

We Americans have in the last half-century compiled a truly awful record of bringing havoc by force of arms and by subversion to one country after another whose indigenous politics and culture we neither respect nor understand. The record is long, from Guatemala and Iran and the Congo in the 1950s, to Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and to Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade. A cumulative record of body bags without number, and continuing tumult in the countries we leave behind when the game is over.

Based on that record, I would say that we don’t have the moral authority or wisdom to “correct” yet another country, this time Syria, by the application of military force.

Moreover, to bomb or rocket distant Syria as you propose to do would be an outright act of war, to which Syria would have the right, ugly as such rights are, to answer in kind, however and wherever it can.

It’s reckless and prideful of you, with your ill-conceived talk of “red lines,” to incur that risk in the name of the 300 million of us you were elected to serve.